SwissText 2024 took place on June 10-11, 2024 in Chur at the Fachhochschule Graubünden (FHGR). It is an annual conference that brings together text analytics experts from industry and academia. It is organized by the Swiss Association for Natural Language Processing (SwissNLP) in collaboration with local universities and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW).

Topic: Large Language Models

Biography: Lewis Tunstall is a Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face, whose work lies at the intersection of the open-source and research teams. He is the co-author of the bestseller “NLP with Transformers” book and has previously built machine learning-powered applications for start-ups and enterprises in the domains of NLP, topological data analysis, and time series. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics, was a 2010 Fulbright Scholar and has held research positions in Australia, the USA, and Switzerland. His current work focuses on building tools and recipes to align language models with human and AI preferences through techniques like reinforcement learning.

Topic: Computational linguistics

Biography: Torsten Zesch a full professor of Computational Linguistics at the CATALPA (Center of Advanced Technology for Assisted Learning and Predictive Analytics) at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany.

He holds a doctoral degree in computer science from Technische Universität Darmstadt and was the president of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL) from 2017 to 2023. His main research interests are in educational natural language processing, in particular the ways in which teaching and learning processes can be supported by language technology and AI. For this purpose, he develops methods for the automatic analysis of textual and multimodal language data, with a focus on robust and explainable models.

Topic: Data Protection in AI

Biography: Dr. iur. Michèle Balthasar, lawyer, founder and managing director of Balthasar Legal AG, has established herself as an experienced data protection, energy, information, and communications lawyer. She specializes in advising small, medium-sized, and internationally active companies. Michèle Balthasar is also an external company data protection officer in accordance with the Swiss Data Protection Act and a certified lead auditor ISO 27001. Prior to that, she worked for more than 15 years as an in-house lawyer in various functions in companies in the energy industry. This gave her a strong practical orientation, which she now uses to support her clients in complex legal and organizational challenges in a solution-oriented and pragmatic manner.

Topic: Attacks on LLMs

Biography: LLM Security & Safety. Experienced scientific leader in machine learning and natural language processing. Has won and directed millions of euro in research funding and published hundreds of articles on NLP & ML. Leads Strømberg NLP research unit at the IT University of Copenhagen. PhD from England’s largest NLP group, the University of Sheffield, with solid international experience across USA, UK, Denmark, China, Russia.

Topic: Connecting Digital Ink with Large Vision/Language Models

Biography: Jesse Berent is a Director of Research Engineering at Google AI Zurich. His group focuses on fundamental research and applied AI in the fields of media understanding and generation, digital ink recognition and machine learning. Prior to joining Google in 2009, Jesse was a post-doctoral researcher at Imperial College London focusing on multi-view image analysis. He obtained his PhD in 2008 in Communications and Signal Processing at Imperial College London and his Masters in Microengineering from the EPFL, Switzerland.

SwissText 2024 adopts the code of conduct of the SwissNLP association which is itself based on the ACM code of conduct.